Devil - Not all Shyamalan's ideas are shit then!

Those who will permit me to pontificate at any length about films will eventually discover that I am extremely indifferent towards the work of M. Night Shyamalan.  I don't really understand why it is that The Sixth Sense captured the imagination of the zeitgeist in quite the way it did, and as a result elevated Shyamalan's stock to Holywood darling almost overnight.  The Sixth Sense is one twist.  The Happening is boring and nothing happens.  The Village's twist is telegraphed in the opening shot.  Signs is ok for a bit, but the final act is horrible.  People seem to like Unbreakable, but I'm just not into that superhero stuff like them.  Sure he has other work, but I'm going to judge him on what I've seen, and it ain't much cop.

I can't work out why it is that I ended up in possession of a copy of Devil on DVD.  Some vague Mark Kermode review I imagine.  It's a film that Shyamalan had nothing to do with the production of, but it is based on a story by him.  I know this because the DVD cover insists on telling me, such is the assumption that putting Shyamalan's name on a thing makes the thing more desirable.  It is only 80 minutes long, and tells the story of 5 people who are trapped in a lift, the police and workers in the building who are trying to save them.  The supernatural premise is that the people in the lift are being toyed with by the Devil, out to torture some undeserving souls and then kill them off for their mortal sins.  Fair enough, horror shlock here we come I guess!

For starters, the film wasn't what I was expecting.  I was imagining that we would spend most of the film inside the lift, and that how or why they were there would be a mystery.  Eventually it would turn out to be some sort of Jacob's Ladder thing and they all end up at the lift's destination - in hell.  In fact it is set in a very real lift in a very real building, in which there is a very real and overt supernatural force at work.  A spooky face even appears on the CCTV footage to prove it.  Cue Mexican guy doing Catholic prayers and telling mystical stories about the Devil coming to collect souls.  Better get the ethnic to be the mystical one, because that isn't racist.

Each of the 5 people in the lift are a bit of mystery, who they are and what they're in the building to do all eventually sheds light on why it is that the Devil wants their souls in particular.  It's not particularly shocking as far as horror goes, with a bit of blood and voice effects to make things seem nastier than they are, but the ending is quite satisfying - which surprised me a lot.

Maybe this is what Shyamalan needs to do for the rest of his career - just come up with the ideas and let other people flesh them out.  If you want 80 minutes of average-to-good 15-rated 'horror', give Devil a go.

Cocktail - not really for me

My journey through the back catalogue of film history took me further through my girlfriend's DVD collection at the weekend.  After Pretty Woman and Almost Famous, we are left with the remains in the bottom of the barrel - Cocktail.  I cannot say that having never heard of a film necessarily means I should be unsurprised it wasn't very good, that's happened a lot of times before.  But maybe I should make exception in this case.

Here Tom Cruise plays Brian Flanagan, recent returnee from the army who has no job, no prospects and no things.  He heads into the heart of 1980s Wall Street Loads-a-money capitalism seeking to make his fortune.  Somehow he gets a bunch of interviews in big city firms (with no qualifications -how?) but no offers.  Only when he takes a job in Doug Coughlin bar in suburban New York and discovers a skill for - what else - making cocktails does the future suddenly seem bright.

Coming just a couple of years after Top Gun, this is one of Cruise's earliest performances in screen, and his charisma is clear.  Sadly I can't say the same for the rest of this film, which is a little bit about 1980s monetarism and another little bit about being who you are rather than who others think you should be.  Mostly it is confused about its characters, the continuity of its own events and why its female characters especially act the way they do.  Most bizarre of all is Jordan (Elizabeth Shue - her off Back to the Future) who Flanagan falls for and for whom she falls back despite Flanagan acting like a total arse around her all the time.

By the time the end comes around and - spoiler alert - Flanagan gets his happily-ever-after as presciently predicted by Coughlin in one of his opening scenes; I was left wondering how all that had happened, and why it was meant to be interesting.  Certainly this is only one for fans of Tom Cruise or fancy cocktail-making to check out.  To be fair, assuming there are no stunt doubts going on here Cruise did really well to get though the flamboyant cocktail creation scenes - but that's not enough to cause me to recommend.  A curio from the 1980s you can happy pass by.